


I'll take it, it'll do

by themis



Category: Tom Stoppard - Arcadia
Genre: 19th Century, F/M, Ghosts, Mathematics, Poetry, Post-Canon, Unrequited Love, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-12 03:46:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/120402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themis/pseuds/themis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thomasina leans over the table, smiling her Kingdom of Heaven smile, avoiding the ink by virtue of youth or death or both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll take it, it'll do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seawench](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seawench/gifts).



> Thanks to prodigy and Caitie for wonderful read-throughs. Any remaining mistakes are, sadly, mine.

He turns forty, and it starts to truly bother him that Thomasina is still nearly seventeen. It bothered him well before this point, of course, but the concern seems more relevant now.

"Well, I am _dead_ , Septimus," she snaps. "And - that should be a five."

"It is a five."

Thomasina's face twists with explicit skepticism. "This?" She indicates the digit she means.

"Ye-es."

"Well, if you're certain, Septimus."

"I am certain," he says. "I am also - "

"Do tell me, Septimus." Thomasina's seventeen-year-old, dead, luminous face invites nothing so much as a full confession, although Septimus knows better than anyone in the world that he has no sins which he might offer to her.

"Well?"

"I am - gnarled," he says lamely.

"Gnarled?" Thomasina's smiles have always revealed her teeth in a manner resembling a jeweler's presentation of pearls. Why, Septimus wonders, should youth entrance us so? Even dead, it beckons like Nimue to Merlin.

"As you see," he murmurs. "Gnarled."

Thomasina leans over the table, smiling her Kingdom of Heaven smile, avoiding the ink by virtue of youth or death or both. "'She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss...'"

Septimus looks away, returning his focus to the proofs.

"Well?" Thomasina's voice contains a challenge.

"'For ever wilt thou love,'" he finishes, "'and she be fair.' I am glad, my lady, that you do not bat your eyelashes, for I never could have loved a girl who bats her eyes _and_ begs for waltzes." But when he looks up she no longer hangs over their equations, and in fact the hermitage now lacks any sign of her anywhere at all.

***

Thomasina hovers in the doorway, seventeen years old and holding an apple for Plautus.

"Thanks," Septimus says. She is still there when he blinks, and so is the apple, so he takes it and slices it, only to find that Plautus is currently untraceable. The apple slices remain undisturbed on the paper-strewn table, taut and glistening in the absence of a tortoise.

"It will get _brown_ , Septimus," Thomasina reproaches him.

"I got grey," he tells her, as if they are trading colors. He bites down on a slice. The apple is not ripe, and bitter as bile. Septimus winces as the juice floods his mouth and fills in a cut he'd not known about before.

"Septimus!" Thomasina laughs.

"Plautus does not care for green fruit, my lady." He takes up another slice of the apple, chewing slowly.

Thomasina watches his reaction to the fruit with superior detachment. "You might sprinkle sugar over them, like strawberries."

"That's disgusting," he says slowly, but his face clearly reveals that he is considering the suggestion. "And I have no sugar."

"Oh, well - " She turns, as if to retrieve a sugar bowl from an unseen tea tray.

"No!" Septimus yelps.

But he doesn't speak quickly enough, and instead of coming into the hermitage, sugar in her hands, she disappears.

Plautus reveals himself not half a minute later, and accepts a sliver of Thomasina's apple. Septimus attempts to feed him the rest of the fruit but Plautus is, in many ways and despite Aristotle, the more rational animal, and will not be convinced to accept a second slice. So Septimus eats the rest of the apple instead. It goes brown before he can summon up courage enough to eat the final slice, and the passage of time fails to sweeten the flesh. But he does eat it, and the sour juice enflames his mouth with every bite.

***

The hermitage is, by now, even more irregular than its original wont. Papers crowd the walls in uneven stacks, cover his table and bed, threaten to overcome the cottage entirely. There is a sense about the place that the sheets breathe with Septimus, or that they have a heart beating in time with his. He stretches his perpetually ink stained fingers against the table. The marks are dark enough to be old blood, and they say too much about where Septimus put his hands. He rubs a wrist, one finger sliding down to feel the quiet pump of blood and depositing a smudge of ink there, in case he forgets in the future. He looks up, taking stock of his house; a house that Lewis or Walpole might have counted himself proud to create. "'Art thou that Prophet?'" Irony grows increasingly difficult to suppress, for all the lack of speech his life now encompasses.

Thomasina shakes her head. "I am not," she says. "I drew _you_ like the Baptist in the wilderness, despite the scarcity of locusts in Derbyshire."

Septimus smiles, a twisting expression like an old tree root. "Then, I must tell them: 'Make straight the way of the Lord.' Is that the agreement?"

Thomasina pushes the paper toward him.

"When you ask your father for my head - " he begins, but cannot think of how he meant to finish. Instead, he takes up the pen again and contemplates the proof.

***

"'Even in Arcadia, there am I.'" Thomasina has another apple, ripe this time, and glowing with promises. She tosses it up in the air and catches it in a dull juggling act, rife with metaphorical interpretations.

Septimus wants to say that he is, indeed, aware of her presence in Arcadia, that he sometimes thinks of nothing beyond Poussin's phrase for days, and that -

"Where is Plautus?" Thomasina asks.

"Hades," he says, "or the terrapine equivalent thereof."

"No!" she cries.

Septimus looks up from the equations, certain he hears tears in her denial and curious to find traces of them in her face.

"Ghosts don't cry, Septimus." The scorn in her voice reveals her age more authentically than anything else she has ever done, except, perhaps, beg for a waltz. "Do you want the apple?"

"There's a question." Septimus looks back down at his papers. "Is this how Milton's daughters experienced life?"

"Were they hermits concerned with mathematics?" Thomasina asks. She offers the apple, mellow-looking and full in her hand.

"No, but you know that wasn't what I meant." Hesitantly, he reaches out for the apple, closes his hand around the fruit, feeling for her fingers - her wrist -

"You will only be disappointed," she says quietly, sadly, tears in her voice again, and disengages her fingers from the apple.

Septimus runs his hands over the swelling sides of the fruit. "I think you'll find that there is quite a tradition of weeping spirits...And that if there is anything I have grown accustomed to it is disappointment."  



End file.
